How Should Humanity Steer the Future? -- Sideways! by Thomas Howard Ray

Tom,

Very much so. So even though we frequently don't see eye to eye, sometimes that difference of perspective can lead to broader understanding in other subjects.

Regards,

John

Tom,

The American way of consumption did indeed conquer the hearts of many people worldwide and caused the collapse of Soviet Union. I am however not sure whether this temptation will still suffice as to get control over religious conflicts like in Syria, nationalism like between Russia and Ukraine, and the seemingly harmless unlimited growth of population.

When I was a boy, I read a booklet that told me the main center of power and culture was shifting from Greece to Rome, to Eastern Rome, from Spain to France, etc. Maybe, China could get leading in future if mankind will be unable to install an international secular power. I am sure having Nobel correctly understood in that question.

Regards,

Eckard

A theory of how to fix the world:

We don't intend to debate the liberal ideal here -

we believe in it. We think it's the only sane

ideal among all choices, because it doesn't

expect the individual or the society to do the

same things over and over again only to get the

same undesirable results; it expects the

individual to grow on her own terms. What we

intend, is to frame a scientific perspective that

allows both believers in democracy, and the

opposition, to coexist and prosper in the

inevitable transition to a democratic world. For

if this transition is not inevitable, extinction of

the species is all we can look forward to.

We are trying not to write a political tractate -

facts are as they are, and we offer to explore a

fact-based scientific, not political, solution.

Politics, nevertheless, can as easily pave the way

for science as for special interests that pay for

their privileges with expensive lobbying of

legislators.

We may see a particular structural model, then,

as a mode of communication by which individuals, and cultural/political organizations of

individuals, can freely contribute to the

common well and drink from it, without being drowned in some doctrine of forced behavior.9

The motivation for Lim, et al, derives from Bar- Yam's extensive research in complex systems,

culminating in the theory of multi-scale variety. This theory generalizes the principle that

lateral, rather than hierarchical, distribution of activity and information drives system

effectiveness: "In considering the requirements of multi-scale variety more generally, we can state

that for a system to be effective, it must be able to coordinate the right number of components to

serve each task, while allowing the independence of other sets of components to perform their

respective tasks without binding the actions of

one such set to another." 10

Underlying is a hidden assumption we wish to make obvious: human free will transcends cultural and

political boundaries; if the means to cooperate is available, the will follows.

The means to guarantee entitlements - food, clothing, shelter, education and mobility - is a

logistics problem.

We want to explore how high-tech logistics

management of many small and redundant

systems, linked in a robust global network,

makes it possible to guarantee equal global

sharing of resources without depriving

individuals of personal access and use of as

much property as they can acquire, in unequal

measure. The idea of ownership in this model

shifts from control of people to control of real

property in a distributed system:

Bar-Yam introduced multi-scale variety, the idea

that independent subsystems allowed to organize

around task coordination at different times on

different scales, makes the larger system

effective. One can summarize: locally efficient

use of resources assures global effectiveness in

the creative growth of resource availability -

with the caveat that local subsystems remain

independent, because otherwise the drain on

local resources will reduce subsystem

effectiveness and cause an undesirable positive

feedback loop by lack of sufficiently varied

resources to sustain required tasks.

A remarkable 2006 result of Dan Braha and

Yaneer Bar-Yam 17 demonstrated that in a selforganized

communication network, a

continuously shifting hub of distributed activity

causes the map to sometimes vary quickly and

radically on local scales over short time

intervals, even while the map itself shows little

global change aggregated over long time

intervals.

This abstract model would mirror complex

military movements and communications, if we

considered the map as a theater of operations thesize of the globe. That is, each communicator in

the network has at their workstation all the

necessary resources to deliver a message and

coordinate events, sometimes acting as the hub

of activity, sometimes as the beneficiary of

information and sometimes as provider of

information. Point is, the metastability of the

system over time suggests that a continually

shifting range of activity represented by

changing hub configurations is self limiting; as a

result, the global domain is largely protected

from the danger of positive feedback - i.e., a loss

of system control and potential widespread selfreinforcing

destruction.

Etc.

Tom,

I can't transfer enough parts in a single message. My message is: save us from saviors of the world. What we get is: Disruption; Sanity checks; Censorship; Blacklisting; Containment; Violence; etc.

James Putnam

The leader in my question was Yaneer Bar-Yam.

James Putnam

Tom,

One misses concrete examples. For instance the Lim quote ("Violence arises due to the structure of boundaries between groups rather than as a result of inherent conflicts between the groups themselves") sounds meaningful, it makes linguistic sense, but what happens if it's applied to, say, Israel-Palestine or Northern Ireland? What are the "structures of the boundaries" as differentiated from the "inherent conflicts between the groups themselves"? More specificity please.

The sideways idea is interesting. It has a warrant in the structure of societies in mid-evolution (say the feudal period in Western Europe ... distributed nodes were definitely the game). Studying the history trading routes is always fascinating. Why do societies become increasingly hierarchical and centralized? Actually, Marx had some thoughts about that. So does Pitteky more recently. It has a lot to do with initial conditions plus the fact that accumulation tends to accumulate accumulatively.

A TV show my wife and I watch (we even record it when we're not home) is "Down East Dickering" on the History Channel. I see it as a sideways model even though I'm not conned by the scripted quality of some of the narrative. Anyway you observe wealth being created and consumed on a very elemental level by imaginative exchange of goods and services by skilled and decent people who know what they're doing. It makes one proud to be a human being.

Nick, I agree about concrete examples. The Science article referenced has them -- I think it's available online without charge; if not, ping me and I'll shoot you a copy.

The portion of Lim et al quoted in my essay continues: "Violence arises due to the structure of boundaries between groups rather than as a result of inherent conflicts between the groups themselves. In this approach, diverse social and economic causal factors trigger violence when the spatial population structure creates a propensity to conflict, so that spatial heterogeneity itself is predictive of local violence. The local ethnic patch size serves as an 'order parameter,' a measure of the degree of order of collective behavior, to which other aspects of behavior are coupled. The importance of collective behavior implies that ethnic violence can be studied in the universal context of collective dynamics, where models can identify how individual and collective behavior are related."

So as one expects, the scholarly technical treatment to follow is pretty heavy sledding for an essay format.

Thanks for the historical example; it sounds like something I'd like to look into. Though I agree with Popper about "the poverty of historicism," which is the Marxist-Leninist weakness. I think that the sideways view of history permits self-similarity in historical patterns over time scales, though it denies historical causality, i.e. dialectical materialism. It also seems capable of being the foundation of a true science of history if my own favorite definition of 'science' is true: "All science is the search for unity in hidden likenesses." (J. Bronowski)

I'll also look up the TV show if I get a chance. Thanks for the kind words; I think a committed rationalist cannot but appreciate the harmony of life; local conflict dampened by local self determination.

Best,

Tom

Tom,

I found an article in WIRED that summarizes the New England Institute study specifically re: Switzerland.

CH isn't a good example to counterpose to Israel-Palestine and Northern Ireland. Ethnic conflict in those two locales carries a history of invasion in the Ulster case and an internationally-sanctioned ingathering (against the wishes of many indigines) in the other. In both instances conflict was inevitable because one ethnic group had the power. Switzerland's history is one of successful resistance to foreign incursions in which all the language groups and both religious groupings were involved.

What would have happened in Switzerland without the cantonal system? Impossible to say. Linguistically there might have been issues but religiously not necessarily. Take the Netherlands which is close to evenly-balanced between Protestant and Catholic but where all citizens speak the same language. A monument to national stability. Take neighboring Belgium, in which almost everyone is Catholic but the country is linguistically and ethnically divided between Flemish and French. And effectively cantonized as well. The nation's barely hanging together.

My real problem with the general systems and complexity theory approach to just about everything is that it tries to smooth away distinctions in the quest for common patterns. Everything becomes isomorphic. Quote from Bar-Yam: "The propensity to violence is not that different between Switzerland and Yugoslavia." Actually, yes, it is, very much so. The Ottoman invasion (remember the Field of Blackbirds) and creation of an Islamic South Slav population in Bosnia made a hell of a difference for the fate of the future Yugoslavia. So did invasions from the West which created a Catholic population using the Latin alphabet in Croatia and Slovenia in opposition to the Orthodox/Cyrillic culture of Serbia. Historical memory matters. In Switzerland it's unifying across ethnicities and in the NL it's at least benign. In many other places not so much.

Cantonization in Switzerland supposedly promotes local cantonal identity at the expense of ethnic (German, French, Italian) identity and makes Swiss-ness possible. But if you tell that to the Swiss they smile. The cantons were simply there before the country was, they say. There are other reasons Switzerland works. Thoughts of being governed from Berlin, Vienna, Paris or Rome for instance.

I understand that network systems are individually self-similar in approximately the same sense that a Mandelbrot pattern is self-similar and unlike others ... but still they're all Mandelbrot sets and there are meta-rules defining what those are and governing their emergence. (Sidebar: do you see merit in Tegmark's belief that the actual information content of the universe is minimal?)

Anyway, I'm judging here entirely by the results of the NECSI approach. I have the 2007 Science article now as well as the 2011 "Good Fences" piece from the ArXiv. My beef is that the authors take some extraordinarily complicated socio-cultural situations (in South Asia, Former Yugoslavia, Switzerland) with deep, complex, individual histories and evaluate them essentially in terms of physical, including topological, boundaries between communities (as described using a certain one-size-fits-all set of standards) and the presence or absence of local autonomy as they define local autonomy. As though geographical and political boundaries were the essential or only contributing factor to communal violence wherever it arises and if you can just manipulate those factors in an appropriate manner violence will diminish. I just feel something's missing.

Yes, what is it with the Login?

Tom,

Hierarchical certainly has not worked through the ages. Many models of the future do point to decentralization, but these are doomsday -- more primitive without trade and networking.

Capitalism seems to give lip-service to individualism but the model tends to work toward subjugation of the individual for the purpose of control and profit. The self-interest at the top and its control of government oppresses all else. Certainly your reference to 85 controlling half the world's wealth indications the distortions of the current systems - I cite the same example.

Your model seems to bring light and breath into the levels where genius and self-determination can flourish. The problem is that current power structures won't melt to allow this transition.

Jim